Your Mind is a Temple

I’m willing to bet that every woman reading this in their teens, 20s, and 30s was told at some point during her childhood that she was beautiful, unique, special, worthy, important, and/or had the ability to change the world. Whether you heard it from your parents, teachers, or other adults responsible for your upbringing, chances are that you’ve been told one or more of these things. Some girls believed it. But I’m also willing to bet that a lot of us didn’t.

You know what I think has to happen before we can achieve true self-confidence? We have to get let down enough times that, not only do we have to learn how to pick ourselves back up again, but also realize that the reason we keep getting let down is because we let our lack of self-confidence impact how we view other people. Take a serious, relatively healthy romantic (even to some extent platonic) relationship for example: If one individual has little-to-no self-confidence, she will be constantly looking for validation from her partner. When she doesn’t get that validation (because no one is able to provide that emotional support every single day – it’s draining) she starts to resent her counterpart. Resentment breeds contempt, and that’s where relationships wane and can even ultimately fail.

We learn from our mistakes, or at least that’s what they say. But I think for me I have to make the same mistake a couple of times before I get it through my thick skull that I’m doing something wrong. You gotta get your heart kicked in the ass a few times before you understand anything about love. The same holds true for understanding our own behavior, which is directly linked to our perception of ourselves.

Self-confidence is something inherent in a few people, hard-won in others, and never attainable in the select few who refuse to try. Women are generally more introspective than men (Science with a capital ‘S’ said so!), and suffer from depression more frequently. Of course those statistics could all be skewed by reporting, but I can say from my experience that I know a greater number of depressed women than men. And, as I’ve always found boys easier to get along with than girls (until I joined a sorority) I’m friends with a pretty even number of each. Women over-analyze every situation, which is the source of our confidence issues, or at least, that’s always been the source of mine.

Ladies (and I suppose gentlemen), listen carefully. No one is paying attention to the crazy shit tumbling around in your brain. You have to deal with most, usually all, of it on your own. You may one day find a partner you can share it with and who can help you deal with it (I hope we all do!), but you have to learn how to shore yourself up against your own insecurities. For me, it can’t be about getting validation from others, or even success at the things that I do. An A in a class or a job promotion isn’t going to help me overcome insecurities because I’ll constantly be looking for someone to pat me on the head and tell me I did a good job. It has to be about yanking out each one of my crippling flaws and overcoming them. I haven’t overcome every one of them yet, it’s a huge work in progress, but I have faith that one day I’ll get there. Not only will I have picked myself back up, but I will have also built something inside myself that I can look at with pride. A sort of internal temple to my awesomeness. Christian theology will tell you that your body is a temple. Yeah whatever, the body is secondary, the mind is the true temple.